Thursday, November 7th, 2013 marks the official opening of the Xbox One Headquarters!! Located on 11 Bloor Street West in the downtown Toronto area, this two-floor, 5000 sq. feet venue is the first dedicated Xbox One storefront in Canada and will remain open until December 29, 2013. We were definitely excited for the sneak preview and to get our hands and bodies on some Xbox gaming action.

The Kinect, as many know, uses a sensor to track users rather than a controller. I was able to test the capacity of this sensor as I danced in Ubisoft’s newly released Just Dance 2013 and the sensor was able to keep up with my awesome dance moves and kept me moving throughout the night! My dance skills aside, I was even able to try the new Call of Duty: Ghost and wasn’t disappointed as I went head-to-head with eight other players. Although the Kinect features for COD are pretty basic, it does allow users to use their voice to navigate certain menu features. In the single player campaign, players have the additional feature of issuing certain squad commands with their voice.

One of the Kinect features that blew me away was Xbox Fitness. The level of personal training integrated with familiar training videos was truly unexpectable. Xbox has Kinect’ified already existing videos like the P90x Program and Jillian Michaels by combining the Kinect with a real time rating system as it monitors your workout. I was super impressed and stoked at the idea of recording a ‘Personal Best’ and then beating that record while having the Kinect improve my overall workout form. With a huge increase in detail tracking, the new Kinect allows for a much tighter workout space than before. It can even tell the difference between a knee pushup and a regular pushup!

Games that I’m looking forward to playing more:

1. Forza Motorsports® 5 is going to be one my of my favorite racing games. My favourite Kinect feature is the ability to tilt ones head to affect the angle of view in the car. The graphics are also reality blurring and players can also take advantage of a new feature called the Driv’atar (a driving avatar) which will drive and act like you based on your driving habits and performance.

My car (below) after not being able to find the brake, they’ll be sending us the bill. Guess I went a little overboard…

2. Call of Duty®: Ghosts is the first COD series on the next gen consoles and I can’t wait to polish my Kill Death Ratio and own Chris, Jenn and the rest of my friends in a good old fashion Team Death Match. While at the Xbox One HQ, I played a 6 against 4 match!

Look for our screen names once we get set-up!! Instagram/Twitter: @drex_toronto

3. Assassin’s Creed® IV Black Flag™ is expansive and the world is just bloody huge! It’s personally a little terrifying to think of how much time I could spend sneaking around such a large environment. Oh, there are also real modeled pirates and real modeled ships to get you from place to place, yarrr!!

4. Ryse®: Son of Rome had some interesting game play with a cool slowmo feature that helped slow down the blood bathing to manageable levels. I’m curious to get into the story on this one and looking forward to seeing it though to the end.

5. Skylanders® SWAP Force is a well balanced game designed for a younger audience. I found this game to be proper and true to the target age group. The physical portal device and that way level information is store in the physically pieces makes it very easy to play with your character on any Xbox one. Additional physical pieces that interact with the game can also be purchased separately.

Overall, I’m super excited for all the new games and technology at the Xbox One HQ in Toronto! I can hardly wait until the end of the month to get my hands on my own device. I can just imagine how fit I’m going to be from the Xbox Fitness, Eeeeee!!